Pith Number

pith:2QE6M6KH

pith:2026:2QE6M6KHAOIPRHZWANQJSVLOZR

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Cornerstones or Stumbling Blocks? Deciphering the Rock Tokens in On-Policy Distillation

Dawei Li, Runchao Li, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Yuxuan Jiang, Zhao Yang

High-loss Rock Tokens in on-policy distillation resist training yet add almost nothing to reasoning performance.

arxiv:2605.09253 v2 · 2026-05-10 · cs.CL · cs.AI

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{2QE6M6KHAOIPRHZWANQJSVLOZR}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

strategically bypassing these ``stumbling blocks'' can significantly streamline the alignment process, challenging the necessity of uniform token weighting and offering a more efficient paradigm for large-scale model distillation.

C2weakest assumption

The causal interventions used to measure negligible functional contribution to reasoning performance are valid and complete, and that high-loss tokens identified as Rock Tokens truly have no downstream effect on model outputs.

C3one line summary

Persistent 'Rock Tokens' in on-policy distillation resist teacher corrections, consume large gradient norms, yet add negligible value to reasoning, allowing targeted bypassing to streamline alignment.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-02T01:03:48.286268Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

d409e679470390f89f36036099556ecc5f6b72f6c63d0ddf0907eb3bcb265a29

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.09253 · arxiv_version: 2605.09253v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.09253 · pith_short_12: 2QE6M6KHAOIP · pith_short_16: 2QE6M6KHAOIPRHZW · pith_short_8: 2QE6M6KH

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/2QE6M6KHAOIPRHZWANQJSVLOZR \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: d409e679470390f89f36036099556ecc5f6b72f6c63d0ddf0907eb3bcb265a29

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "92339fc440ab4d2fbc71c519d06d3f52f4852462f92dd4ccd22dfb127e656fdb",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.AI"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-10T01:41:43Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "f0fe8d86a87a7b9d7c45fa7b0042d6ff0e5c4180c3fceaf30d14b62f7deef40f"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.09253",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}